A group of historians said Tuesday in Tokyo they have discovered seven
official trial documents suggesting the Japanese military directly forced
women to work at some of their frontline brothels in Indonesia, China,
East Timor and Vietnam.

The documents were produced and submitted by the Dutch, French and
Chinese governments to the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East, widely known among Japanese as the Tokyo Trial.

The seven documents, which the tribunal adopted as evidence, eventually
led to the Japanese military's actions being recognized as a war crime in
a chapter on atrocities that was included in the tribunal's 1948 judgment,
the scholars from the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War
Responsibility said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents'
Club in Japan.

The seven-document discovery may embarrass the Cabinet of Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe as well as other conservative lawmakers who recently
said there is no evidence proving the Japanese military was directly
involved in "forcibly taking" women to military brothels.

"The Special Naval Police (Tokei Tai) had ordered to keep the
brothels supplied with women; to this end they arrested women on the
streets and after enforced medical examination placed them in the
brothels," one document, titled Prosecution Document No. 5330, says.
The report on "comfort women" in western Borneo was prepared by
the Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service.

"Women who had had relations with Japanese were forced into there
brothels, which were surrounded by barbed wire. They were only allowed on
the streets with special permission," the document says.

The seven documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial
from 1946 to 1948. Parts of three of them were briefly reported on by the
Asahi Shimbun in 1997. Many former comfort women have given public
testimony about similar experiences with coercion at military brothels.

But little of the seven trial documents -- officially prepared by three
non-Japanese governments and used as evidence -- had been revealed to the
public until now, which is why the war study center held Tuesday's news
conference, said Hirofumi Hayashi, a professor at Kanto-Gakuin University
and a research director at the center.

"I organized a brothel for the soldiers and used it myself,"
Lt. Seidai Ohara of the Japanese military was quoted in Prosecution
Document No. 5591, dated Jan. 13, 1946.

Ohara was being interrogated about a case in Moa Island, Indonesia.
Some of the women were unwilling to work in the brothel but were forced to
do so anyway because they were the daughters of the men who attacked the
Kempei Tai (Japanese military police), he said.

Hayashi said at the news conference that "the (postwar) Japanese
government accepted the war criminal trial with Article 11 of the peace
treaty" that was signed to end the postwar Occupation in 1951.

"Thus the Japanese government must admit the coercion and
criminality of the comfort women system," Hayashi said.

The reason why Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not accepted
Japanese governmental and military responsibility in the process of sending
women and girls to brothels is because he claims there was no evidence of
coercion. In advance of his visit to the U.S. scheduled on April 26, he
explained in an interview with Newsweek his responsibility as the prime
minister last Saturday regarding military comfort women and did not retreat
from his existing position that is: "There is no evidence of coercion for
the comfort women."

Many cases submitted to Tokyo courts as evidence contain testimonies that
contradict his assertion, however.

The following are questions and answers given by a Japanese lieutenant in
January 1946 at an Allied Forces Netherlands tribunal in which he confessed
the Japanese army "forcibly recruited comfort women from occupied
territories."

Q: Some witnesses said you raped women and sent them to military barracks
for more sexual assault from Japanese soldiers.

A: I built a brothel for my soldiers and I used it too.

Q: Did the women accept being sent to the brothel?

A: Some accepted it and others did not.

Q: How many women lived there?

A: Six.

Q: How many women were sent against their will?

A: Five.

Q: Why were those women forcibly sent there?

A: They were daughters of people who attacked military police office.

Q: Were they sent to the brothel because of their fathers' activities?

A: Yes.

Before this Q & A session, details about massacre of residents who tried
to attack the military police office were stated.

On Portuguese East Timor Island the Japanese military forced the head of
the area to cooperate with them to recruit comfort women. A Portuguese medic
who witnessed the scene testified the following in June 1946.

"I know many places where Japanese people forced the head of each area to
send girls to their brothels. They intimidated the head to cooperate with
them in sending women and girls to the brothel by saying that they would
send the head's relative girls to the brothel unless they cooperated."

The Japanese Navy directly managed a brothel in Borneo Island in
Indonesia, and military police was responsible for gathering comfort women
(July 1946). A Japanese freelancer took governmental information from the
Netherlands in 1992 and released it in the Japanese monthly magazine Sekai.
The Netherlands government included this information in a report summarized
in January 1994.

The case of Magelang in Java Island in Indonesia (May 1946) was described
vividly by a 25 year-old Dutch woman. She was detained in a brothel for
three weeks with other comfort women by Japanese soldiers and was sent to
detention camp by a Japanese military officer.

"We were sent to an asylum from a detention camp by Japanese soldiers on
January 28, 1944 and underwent a health inspection by Japanese doctors on
February 3. We heard that we would be sent to a brothel for the Japanese.
There was a rumor that the brothel would open that night. After returning to
our room, Ms. Bracker and I closed all our windows and doors. Around 9
o'clock in the evening, we heard knock. Military police forced us not to
close the door. The military police brought a Japanese soldier and said we
must accept the soldier. The military police forced us to do so by saying,
'If you do not accept the soldier, your husband will be responsible for
that.' The brothel was opened for officers in weekdays, and for sergeants on
Sunday afternoons. Sunday mornings was for private soldiers and sometimes
for common Japanese people. We always resisted but it was in vain."

The report also includes cases submitted by French inspectors which
proved forced mobilization of prostitutes in Langson, Vietnam and fake
advertisements for factory workers in Guilin, China.

Mr. Hayashi, a Japanese professor, pointed out that in addition to court
documents, an official report publicized by the Japanese government in 1992
contained data that verifies the Japanese army was involved in the
mobilization of sex slaves in China. A Japanese military officer's
instructions on the "mobilization of military comfort women," which was sent
to a military detachment stationed in China in March 1938, reveals the
following records: "Detached units will control mobilization and lead the
selection of comfort women; detached units should maintain close cooperation
with local military police and police authorities."